


Holy Mother

by Phlyarologist



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Dark, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-08 01:24:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17971826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/pseuds/Phlyarologist
Summary: Mylene didn't choose any of this.





	Holy Mother

The blood tests came back, and the mana profile - along with a bottle of sparkling wine, hand-delivered by the Pope’s personal servant. The future closed around Mylene like a coffin. People she didn’t know congratulated her on her impending marriage. The people who did know her were more reserved. No one said the word “broodmare,” although she thought it quite a bit.

She didn’t like the Chosen. He smiled when he told her he would not promise fidelity, and smiled harder while explaining that, once she’d birthed their next savior, she too could do whatever she liked. He didn’t seem malevolent, only heartless in a casual way and heedless of consequence. She thought she’d prefer to be married to someone evil.

When the new Chosen arrived she didn’t like him either, although she loved him sometimes, when she couldn’t help it. Sometimes she stood over his bed and thought, It isn’t his fault. Sometimes she thought it was. That grasping infant hand had wrung her life dry of everything worthwhile. How could Zelos be her son when he had existed before her, forcing her every step, determined to be born?

Eventually the child learned to speak, as she was assured most children do, so that was a little better. Easier to ignore than hours of senseless yowling. Although now she had to be more careful what she said around him, because it was hard to guess how much he understood. Well, fine; she’d bitten her tongue since the day she was betrothed. “You’re not even a person,” she had told her son once, in secrecy, “and if you take after your father, I doubt you ever will be.” But that was a one-time indulgence and must be dispensed with now.

Eventually the child proved clever, which was troubling. He was six years old; they were hosting a party. He looked up abruptly from the pile of gifts he’d received and said, “Mom, are these from my friends?”

What a question.

“Are they from _your_ friends?”

“No, Zelos.”

“Dad’s friends?”

Well, fully half of the guests have sucked your dad’s dick at some point, so make of that what you will, she thought, but instead she knelt down and straightened his absurd child-sized bow tie and said, “These are from people who want you to remember their names.”

He sighed hugely. Where did children get off, being so world-weary? “Is there gonna be a quiz?”

The theory was that the very wealthy shouldn’t have to raise their own children. They had people for that. And it was true Mylene avoided much of the dirty work, but - what else would she have done with her time? What was her life, if not service to the Chosen? She’d had idle dreams of becoming a sculptor, before the scientists had decided she was the next best thing to sacred and she’d been enjoined to lie back and think of Tethe’alla. She knew she could sculpt now if she wanted to. No one would forbid it. But they’d indulge her in it. They’d have polite smiles and faint applause for her little hobby, so nice that Lady Mylene still found time for herself, how lovely. But meanwhile, Master Zelos…

So he was her project instead. But one she’d been commissioned to do, which held little personal interest. If she hadn’t passed that test years ago, and the Chosen had married someone else, and approached Mylene the starving artist and offered her ten million gald for a bust of his latest mistress, she thought she’d feel about the same.

Sometimes she remembered that he wasn’t his father, and then she would hold his hand and buy him ice cream. Sometimes she remembered that he wasn’t the Church, and sang him a song. Sometimes, like at the party, he would stare at her very seriously and she would realize with a jolt that, more than he was anyone else, he was her.

What a relief. It was all bullshit, and he knew it, too. Neither of them had ever meant to take the other prisoner.

No - “relief” wasn’t the word. Because even understanding that, they couldn’t change anything.

One night he couldn’t sleep - and that was not unusual; he had been a bad sleeper since birth - and came to find her, and asked her questions that cut too close to the bone - also not unusual - and she, too tired to control her tongue, told him his future. “Your body is property of the Church. Someday they’ll make you marry some girl you don’t know, and you’ll break her. You’ll break yourself, too, if you haven’t done it by then.”

He didn’t even look alarmed. She should be alarmed, probably, that he didn’t. “How do they pick who I marry?”

“How should I know? They’re breeding for small, ugly, vicious people. And it seems to be working.”

He touched her hair. “But you’re pretty, Mom.”

He’d be pretty, too, when he grew up. For whatever good that would do him.

Maybe she wanted better for him. She never could decide. Could you wish someone well at the same time you wished they didn’t exist? It didn’t do either of them any good, his life. Only set his bastard father free to chase tail all over the world now he’d made his one legitimate child. How many siblings did Zelos have, she wondered, and were they better off, and by how much? Were their mothers called blessed, too? Were all their mothers burdened with holiness, always trying to wash the divine off their skin, year after year?

“I think I may be crazy,” she said to no one in particular, and her maidservant only asked, impassive, if she’d prefer the lapis earrings or the new emeralds.

Another party tonight. Zelos’s birthday again. He kept having those. Shining brighter year by year as she collapsed on herself. But maybe she wasn’t special; maybe motherhood was always that. She’d never seen herself as a parent, until the choice had been taken from her. She put on the proud smile she was supposed to wear and supervised the caterers and didn’t care about any of it, and knew that her son didn’t care either, and she didn’t know if she wanted to flee this pit of vipers with him or just go alone, and never say a word, and save herself. Probably a felony either way.

An apology wouldn’t be out of place, she thought. It might go a long way if he would just apologize to her for being born. Then at least she’d know they were on the same side. She was sorry, too, for bringing him into all this. She wished she could hate him enough not to be sorry. The day might come.


End file.
